I’ve been trying to catch up with Janice Parker, but she’s all over the place – and I mean literally!

Right now she is in Philadelphia on a two week an international exchange lab investigating devised work and intergenerational performance with People’s Light Theatre. She is working with 6 artists from the Epic Theatre Ensemble of New York City, 15 artists from People’s Light, 20 young people ages 13-15 from the city of Chester and Chester County, and 3 other artists from Citizens Theatre in Glasgow and the National Theatre of Scotland, all exploring the classical text Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale to investigate how their responses to this rich, multi-layered material might inspire useful projects and programs.

Janice’s work is most often found at the edges – working with young people, old people and disabled people – people who’s movement intrigues her.

When she gets back, she is working as rehearsal director for PUSH ME’s Claire Cunningham and Gail Sneddon on Menage A Trois, then as movement director rehearsing with the National Theatre of Scotland on ‘The Strange Undoing of Prudentia Hart’, then movement advisor for another show thats part of the Edinburgh Fringe,  ’Mikey and Addie’ which is being directed by Andy Manley,

Then we’ll be lucky enough to have Janice and Private Dancer down in London at the Southbank for the Unlimited Festival and Janice is also speaking as part of a panel of artists who work on the edge, for the talks series Unlimited Voices.

On leaving Southbank, she is off to Romania with Agape Orphanage to work with disabled children and young adults there and create a dance piece that will also involve non-disabled children from the local primary school and in October she is talking at Luminate – Scotland’s Festival of Creative Ageing – about her recent residency with the macrobert Arts Centre working in collaboration  with individual people with dementia to develop new works in dance.

I took the idea of being in residence quite literally and saw it as a chance to inhabit another world…It can be a memory trigger, but it is not just about what has happened in the past, but also what is happening right now… it can be freeing to surrender to the energy of movement, meanwhile, the [dance] discipline was able to help challenge prejudice about what people can and can’t do… As an artist I really like to challenge perceptions of who can dance and what a dancer can be.

Janice’s work may be amazingly varied in geography, age range or role, but it always comes back to these same fundamental roots – the movement itself, and its power, passion and ability to communicate, and opening up this notion of ‘who can dance’ so that the word ‘dancer’ can be owned by everyone.